Tuesday, October 28, 2014

lupin the loop

Couple of brief follow-up notes regarding previous posts, one recent, one not so recent.

Firstly, it was unforgivably remiss of me to neglect to mention that as a result of the explodey demise of bulbs 5, 7, 10 and 12 I can now declare myself the winner of Kitchen Light Bulb Connect Four! Yeah, eat my randomly coincidental linearly-connected bulb filament self-immolation pattern, losers.

Secondly, you might remember my amusedly baffled WTFery at being presented with Wagamama's list of possible food allergies. To be honest, after getting a link to a Monty Python sketch and a couple of cheap fart gags out of it I thought no more about it, until today when I was presented with a list of allergy information from Chef & Brewer's website (a Chef & Brewer establishment being the likely venue for the office Christmas lunch some time in December). And what do I see listed? Lupins!

A bit of internet research reveals that the lupin bean is actually quite widely-used as a foodstuff, particularly in Latin America and the Mediterranean, and crops up (in dried and ground-up form) increasingly frequently as a gluten-free substitute for wheat flour in various culinary applications. Anyone planning, on learning this, to pop straight out to the garden and dig up some lupins for dinner should be warned that unless carefully prepared the lupin bean can contain toxic quantities of certain alkaloids, and you don't want to get lupin poisoning. And that's if you're not allergic to it.

That's all very well, you'll be saying, but I DEMAND to know which of Chef & Brewer's delicious generic pub grub options have potentially dangerous lupin products in them, lest I start tucking into a portion of cod and chips only to unexpectedly have my liver turn inside-out with alkaloid poisoning. Well, you'll be relieved to hear that the answer appears to be: none of them. Not a single one. Still, it's nice that they at least allowed for the possibility.

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The Dreadful Sordid Truth About Me

Living entirely on a diet of sponge fingers and Tizer, the electric halibut is an elusive, enigmatic creature. Who knows where he will pop up next? He may be coming to your town.....no, hang on, that was the Monkees.